The Northern suburbs of Toledo, Ohio turned into a real life Don DeLillo novel overnight, after an explosion at a chemical facility sent plumes of industrial compounds billowing into the sky.

According to the local station WTOL11, the blast happened at a chemical distribution site in Ohio’s Lucas County on Tuesday night, prompting an immediate evacuation order for anybody living within one mile of the disaster zone. Those within three miles were given an order to shelter in place.

In a press conference on Wednesday, city emergency officials explained that the leaking chemical exhaust is glycidyl methacrylate, an industrial manufacturing chemical broadly suspected to be carcinogenic to humans.

Maps show numerous residential neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity, the closest being a trailer park just 0.25 miles as the crow flies from the site of the chemical explosion. The nearby Ottawa river, a tributary of Lake Erie, is situated under a half mile to the South.

Complicating matters for first responders and any broader evacuation order is the onset of a fog alert, which combined with the hazmat emergency has turned Toledo into America’s apocalypse zone du jour.

Images circulated by WTOL11 on Facebook show the cataclysmic scenes unfolding across the city, with commenters expressing confusion over whether the clouds of haze were caused by the airborne chemical leak, the fog, or a noxious mix of both.

“I can’t see out my window,” one Toledo resident wrote. “Should I and my dog leave?”

More on disasters: Giant Oil Tanker Runs Aground in Marine Nature Preserve, Spills Nonstop for Weeks

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When it comes to putting strange substances into your body in 2026, the sky’s the limit.

First there were black-market Russian peptides — and now there are AI-generated viruses, which one startup claims has been used to successfully treat a bacterial infection.

On Tuesday, the company called Radical Numerics published a technical paper on its website, explaining the process by which they trialed an AI-engineered viral treatment on a human subject.

Targeting bacteria with special viruses isn’t new — it’s called “phage therapy,” and it involves deploying viruses that specifically target harmful microscopic organisms. But the hunt for viruses capable of locking onto a particular infection is arduous, and Radical Numerics says it’s found a way to use AI to revolutionize the process.

Yet as the New York Times notes in its reporting, Radical Numerics’ research is really more like a blog post — not only was the study self-published, rather than being vetted by a scientific journal, but it hasn’t even been peer reviewed. Making matters even murkier, the company declined to share clinical information about the patient or the doctors involved with the NYT, citing the proprietary nature of a treatment it hopes to monetize.

“We take our responsibility to protect patient confidentiality and maintain the trust of our clinical partners extremely seriously,” CEO of Radical Numerics Eric Nguyen told the paper. “We intend to publish our scientific findings through peer-reviewed research, with any future disclosure of clinical details subject to appropriate consent.”

As Harvard microbiologist Michael Baym told the NYT, “if it works, that’s incredible,” but his “impulse is to be skeptical.”

As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — and that goes double when you’re running a venture-backed commercial lab exposing sick people to AI-generated viruses.

More on startups: “Customer Surveillance” Startup Says “Every Company Will Soon Assign an AI Agent to Every Customer to Watch Their Every Move”

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As Meta was scrambling to release its Muse AI agent to the public earlier last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to social media to insist that it was “built from the ground up for privacy and security.”

On X-formerly-Twitter, the billionaire’s simple post soon had a correction tagged on via a community note, and for good reason: the AI agent is a font of untold privacy horrors.

As Ars Technica reported today, security researchers found Muse is capable of exposing sensitive information on its users through web links generated via a “share” feature. Investigators at the cybersecurity firm Claroc recently uncovered a simple exploit whereby they could access pages from over 6,800 links Muse had generated to share pages with other users.

The trick worked like this: once a Muse user decides they want to share something with another person — say, a copy of their chat log with Muse — the AI tool would generate a web link for that “share.” That URL included both the AI-generated title of the chat, plus a random string of characters.

When anybody opened the link, the full web address would be noted in a lookup dataset, like a phone book of web addresses that have been visited. Researchers were then able to search that set for other Muse share addresses, from which they were able to find strings of unrelated public chats.

By digging through those “phone books,” investigators were able to easily open chat logs containing detailed private information, including corporate revenue documents, loan applications, bank transaction details, income details, and one workplace vacation calendar, Ars noted.

“If you had asked us beforehand, we would have guessed that gathering these would take real effort,” the researchers wrote. Instead, “it took one query.”

Though Meta told Ars it had shut off the feature, this privacy gaffe is just the latest revelation about Muse’s many security shortcomings.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that Muse was keeping detailed files on users’ friends and families, apparently following an internal instruction to keep a running “page for every person in the user’s life.”

If Muse’s first month in public hands is any indication, this is likely just the start of a long list of security and privacy blunders for the cutesy AI model.

More on Meta: Meta Is Using Its Massive AI Data Centers to Avoid Paying Billions of Dollars in Taxes

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What does it take to get a hyperscale data center built this late into 2026? A whole army of contract laborers living on a prison barge, apparently.

New reporting by Bloomberg revealed some bizarre details around the 30-megawatt data center being developed in Glomfjord, a small industrial village in Norway. Despite being heralded as a crown jewel of British data center company Nscale, the facility is at least six months behind schedule, with just 6.4 megawatts currently up and running.

There are plenty of reasons for the setbacks. Bloomberg notes that costly and avoidable mistakes account for most of the delays, with major cooling system leaks, labor issues, and a huge electrical fire setting construction far behind schedule.

Labor conditions are especially brutal, with workers complaining to the publication about working extremely long shifts without proper training or health and safety protocols in place. An investigation by the Norwegian Labour Inspection Authority found that Nscale’s personnel records were likewise abysmal, with some paperwork only noting a workers’ first name, Bloomberg noted.

Making up for lost time won’t be easy, and surely won’t improve working conditions. To get back on track, Nscale is reportedly looking to bring in hundreds of last-minute laborers. But with most of Glomfjord’s rentable hotel rooms already booked up, the data center developer needed a solution a housing. That’s where a vessel called The Kalmar comes in.

According to Bloomberg, the boat is a three-story prison barge — a dull, gray rectangular ship that was once used as a floating detention center for migrants. It seems that Nscale will soon begin using the Kalmar’s 500 cots to house its new army of contractors, who will commute off the hulking barge to the jobsite.

Like in other places throughout the world, Glomfjord’s 1,000-or-so residents aren’t too thrilled with the data center development. Though mayor Grethe Anita Andersen explained to Bloomberg that she hopes Nscale will deliver a paltry 40 permanent jobs, those aspirations are far from guaranteed.

As Sofie Marhaug, a parliamentarian for Norway’s socialist Red Party told the publication, data center developers “don’t have Norway’s best interests in mind.”

“The value is being made in other places, not in Norway,” Marhaug said. “They don’t move jobs from Silicon Valley to Norway — they just use our natural resources.”

More on data centers: Residents Reject $10,000 Each to Let a Data Center Set Up in Their Town

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Donald Trump’s second spin in the White House has been mired in high-profile incidents of graft and corruption, like the family’s tech stock profiteering, or the now-infamous TrumpCoin scandal. But the president’s latest grift goes far beyond personal wheeling and dealing, extending into the very machines some 174 million voting-aged Americans could use to cast their ballots.

A bombshell investigation by ProPublica revealed that Trump’s cabinet goons overseeing the Department of Homeland Security instructed their underlings to procure a voting machine — and figure out how to hack it.

Specifically, the ProPublica investigation found that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a component of the DHS, was tasked with acquiring a voting machine and reporting its security flaws back to the White House. The revelation comes from two former government officials — speaking anonymously to avoid retaliation — who noted that CISA insiders were outraged at the order.

“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials told ProPublica.

Ironically, the initiative was reportedly complicated by the fact that Elon Musk’s DOGE squad had laid off the CISA agents who would have known how to actually break into voting machines. As a result, the agents who received the order had to repeatedly tell White House officials that the request was impossible.

Per ProPublica, CISA has engaged in security discussions with state governments and voting machine vendors over potential exploits for years. Now, key players involved in overseeing federal election equipment say CISA has left them high and dry for over a year, with zero explanation for their absence during a crucial election season.

“There is a difference between deprioritizing and being nonexistent,” CISA cybersecurity and election consultant Ryan Macias told ProPublica. During the run-up to the crucial US midterm elections between 2025 and September 2026, Macias says the once-reliable CISA experts “were nonexistent. Literally nonexistent.”

Those relationships took years of communication and trust-building to establish — something the Trump administration is apparently happy to discard in record time.

More on Trump: Trump Backs Down, Cancels Livestreamed Firing Squad Execution

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Top AI labs have been hiring subject matter experts across academic disciplines for years at this point — often turning them into glorified fact-checkers whose labor is used to train the AI models of tomorrow. Still, Google’s latest job listing is odd, even by those admittedly strange standards, and may reveal a lot about the future big tech has in mind for humanity.

As reported by the tech industry publication Data Center Dynamics, Google’s AI research lab, DeepMind is now hiring a team of “highly qualified physicists and nuclear engineers” for the role of “nuclear subject matter expert in the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and high-yield Explosives team within the Responsible Development and Innovation team.”

According to the job listing, interested candidate should have a PhD in a field like plasma physics or nuclear engineering, or else “equivalent practical experience,” on top of experience collaborating with a US government lab and familiarity with policy related to “stockpile stewardship, nonproliferation, arms control, or threat reduction” — and that’s just at a minimum.

Ideally, Google says it would prefer its candidates to also have experience to have experience working with AI safety, as well as expertise in computational modeling, experience working at “major laser user facilities,” or the ability to design evaluations and mitigations that are “demonstrably unclassified and non-export controlled by developing dual use science proxies for weapons topics.”

The lucky candidates will be offered a salary in the ballpark of $174,000 to $252,000, with a 15 percent bonus on top.

The job won’t be easy, however. As the listing notes, the role involves evaluating safety risks of so-called “frontier AI models” in the “nuclear domain.” Specifically, this means “model assistance in fission, fusion, and thermonuclear weapons proliferation, radiation hydrodynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, etc. in a demonstrably unclassified and non-export controlled manner.”

Put together, it reads as if Google’s top AI research lab expects the company’s AI tools to start churning out actionable instructions for developing nuclear devices, and is now hiring nuclear physicists to help spearhead the defense efforts.

How serious the scenario is remains to be seen — but Google is clearly willing to put its money where its mouth is.

More on Google: The Tech Industry’s Aggressive Push to Integrate AI Into Schools Is Turning Into a Disaster

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Whether as short-form slop Reels or the data centers that spit them out, Americans are absolutely sick of AI. Their elected officials, however, are going all-in — both embracing gobs of money from tech lobbying arms, and increasingly even embracing the tech to churn out attack ads to tarnish their opponents.

According to reporting from the New York Times, AI generated election ads have become a hundred-million dollar business, generating over $137 million in promotional revenue already in the current election cycle. That’s nearly a quarter of all spending on midterm political advertising overall — which amounts to a cool $565 million in spending across all US house and senate campaigns, according to Wesleyan University’s Wesleyan Media Project research lab.

To date, Wesleyan media researchers found that political action groups have generated over 220 midterm election ads with AI. The vast majority, or 80 percent of those are made by Republicans, with 20 percent generated by Democrats.

For example, one ad by Make Oklahoma Great Again shows Republican candidate for Oklahoma governor Mike Mazzei embracing an AI-version of Hillary Clinton, while an AI Donald Trump pouts off to the side. “Clinton lover, Trump hater,” the ad intones. “That’s Mike Mazzei.”

The ad contains no mention that it was generated by AI. As the NYT notes, the PAC has spent over $200,000 buying TV ad time for the AI commercial across the state of Oklahoma.

“I think what we’re seeing with AI has surprised even us,” professor of government and co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project Erika Franklin Fowler told the NYT. “Some of the ways in which AI is used, honestly, if there wasn’t a disclaimer on the ad, it would be hard to know that AI was there.”

More on AI: OpenAI Hit With Stack of Lawsuits Over ChatGPT Allegedly Coaching Children to Harm Themselves

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A retired professor was handcuffed and arrested last week, for the crime of standing on the sidewalk in front of a delivery robot.

According to local channel 6ABC, 78-year-old Carolyn Marvin was arrested in Philadelphia’s Center City, after planting her feet in the path of an oncoming Avride delivery robot. Marvin, a retired communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told local reporters she was protesting the robots due to the threat they pose to local delivery workers.

“I know they’re taking the jobs of human delivery workers,” Marvin told 6ABC, “and so I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward.”

The “confrontation” — if you can call it that — attracted a small crowd, who watched as police ordered Marvin to move out of the robot’s path. When she refused, citing protected speech, she was arrested and charged with one count of disorderly conduct, which she reportedly plans to dispute in court.

It wasn’t Marvin’s first time passively protesting Philadelphia’s growing fleet of delivery robots, and it probably won’t be her last. Asked by 6ABC whether she plans on continuing her demonstrations, she replied that “I do. Why not?”

“I think it’s my First Amendment right to publicly demonstrate on a sidewalk to protest against delivery robots,” Marvin continued.

In a separate interview with KYW Newsradio, the retired professor said she was protesting the “ruthless way that rich corporations are casting aside human workers — and here, we’re talking about the humble delivery folks — in order to enrich their bottom lines.”

The incident raises a valid legal question around delivery bots: if the privately-owned devices need unimpeded access to public infrastructure to work, who’s responsible for making sure they have room to roam?

More on robots: Walmart Running Into Trouble as Its Super-Expensive Robots Can’t Handle the Realities of Warehouse Work

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For months, executives at top AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have been dumping tens of millions of dollars into political action groups, in an obvious bid to curry favor with electoral candidates ahead of the US midterm elections.

And while we have a good idea of how much money top AI companies have spent — at least $55.7 million so-far — their exact policy positions have been difficult to pin down. That is, until now.

According to Politico, a team of representatives from Anthropic have been engaged in quiet talks with lawmakers about the language of a draft bill on AI regulation. As three people familiar with the deliberations told the outlet, Anthropic’s ideal piece of legislation would give the federal government a kill switch to shut down any AI model that poses an imminent threat.

But there’s a major caveat: for the government to claim a model poses an “imminent threat,” the AI would have to risk serious injury or death of 50 people or more, or property damages exceeding $1 billion. On top of that, there are just three categories of risk that would trigger intervention: the release of a biological weapon, a cataclysmic cyberattack, or the model breaking free of the AI lab’s control.

As Politico explains, the decision would be made by a third party monitor, working under the auspices of the Department of Commerce. If the independent watchdog finds that those conditions are about to be met by any upcoming AI model, Anthropic’s proposal goes, they would have 72 hours to report it to Commerce officials, who would then make the decision to present the evidence to a federal judge.

After all that, it would be in the hands of a single judge to choose whether or not to allow the AI model to go out to the public. With such a convoluted set of conditions and web of government and third-party actors, this setup would seem to give a huge amount of discretion to AI labs themselves, which is evidently exactly what they want.

“This bill represents the proposals outlined in Anthropic’s Advanced AI Framework, which we have been advocating for with federal and state lawmakers since June,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Politico. “These are sensible policies we believe Congress should act on.”

More on AI: Eggheads at Anthropic Said They Used Claude to “Solve” Humor

The post Anthropic Secretly Lobbying Government to Only Shut Down an AI Model If It’s Poised to Kill More Than 50 People appeared first on Futurism.

A biodiversity research team journeying into the incredibly diverse subtropical forests of China’s Ailaoshan Mountains took a strange companion with them: a robotic dog.

The robot, a Lynx M20S developed by DEEP Robotics, assisted the team on a trip organized by the China Association for Scientific Expedition, China’s state-run tabloid the Global Times reported. Photos of the expedition show the researchers using the robot like a pack mule to carry field and imaging supplies, though the unit reportedly also assisted with other tasks like route scouting, image recording, and data collection.

At one point, the robot was even used to capture footage of a rare parasitic plant known as Monotropa uniflora, as well as forest gibbons (though, to be fair, these are tasks a human scientist could surely perform just as well.)

Whether the expedition amounts to a practical deployment or a frivolous gimmick probably depends on how you view commercial robots as a whole. Though it can carry a load of about 220 pounds, the battery life on the Lynx M20S lasts just 2.5 to 3.5 hours, likely putting a decent burden on any researchers who have to lug replacement batteries up the Ailaoshan Mountain range or figure out a way to charge them in situ.

At the same time, it makes for a pretty effective product demo. The Ailaoshan Mountain range and its surrounding area are notoriously treacherous, with navigation of ravines and dense primeval forests complicated by extreme outbursts of precipitation. In 2021, a rapid change in weather on the range resulted in the deaths of four experienced geological researchers — an illustrative example of the kinds of conditions one can expect on the Ailaoshan Mountains.

As a device designed for challenging outdoor terrain, the Lynx M20S’s apparently successful participation in this trek seems to validate the company’s engineering efforts.

Elsewhere, DEEP robotics’ robo-hounds have reportedly assisted with underground tunnel excavation, patrolled urban streets during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and helped firefighters extinguish blazes.

More on robots: Chinese Startup Shows Off Robot Horse You Can Actually Ride

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A new piece of research is pushing back on the long-held belief that plastic is a harmless and chemically inert material.

The new study, published in the journal Nature, took a look at the way micro and nanoplastics interact with water-rich environments such as the human body. It found that typical consumer-grade microplastics exhibit “intrinsic physicochemical activity” there, indicating that the tiny chunks of plastic do indeed react chemically inside our bodies.

“As plastic fragments into smaller and smaller particles, its surface area increases enormously,” Columbia professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering and study co-author Wei Min said in a press release. “Then microplastics change the water that surrounds them, generating high-energy, reactive radicals… that very likely contribute to biological damage that we see in animals and potentially in humans as a result of microplastic exposure.”

Min was previously part of another alarming study, which found that the average liter of bottled water contains upward of 240,000 tiny microplastics, a much higher count than previously known. Combined with the new research, it looks like those untold thousands of plastic bits are capable of causing much more chemical harm than scientists had given them credit for.

As co-author Beizhan Yan put it, “this work has significant implications for environmental and human health,” particularly when it comes to food supply chains.

In the US, plastics make up an integral part of the food chain. They’re heavily integrated into industrial agriculture, present in high quantities throughout food processing, and are extensively used in food distribution, whether to preserve fruits and vegetables or as packaging for groceries.

The scale of plastic packaging alone is staggering: it’s estimated that food packaging accounts for 40 percent of the world’s total plastic production. With billions of dollars riding on the plastics industry, your average working-class person has little hope of skirting microplastics through a simple change in consumption habits — even if you have enough money to buy the haute premium foods packaged in glass or tin, individual consumers have no control over how much plastic their food is exposed throughout the production process.

Given the growing body of work pointing to the horrifying consequences of microplastics on the human body, it seems our collective health depends on finding a way out of this plasticky status-quo — and fast.

More on plastics: Scientists Turn Plastic Waste Into Edible Cookies Because That’s the Future We Deserve

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Loads of stories have emerged over the past few months of corporate executives realizing their all-out drive to use AI was getting them absolutely nowhere. If anything, it was a net negative, as office workers set about wasting their budgets on costly AI tokens to appear productive.

Now, it seems even top tech industry players are cutting back, as they realize their workers are frittering away money and churning out reams of low-effort AI garbage.

As Reuters notes, companies like Meta are scaling back ambitious plans to lay off staffers and replace them with AI agents. Microsoft seems to be doing the same, as the Guardian reports, after executive vice president Ryan Roslansky groused about the rise of low-quality workslop on his public-facing LinkedIn account.

“AI slop isn’t happening just on social networks… it’s happening in the day to day of work,” Roslansky lamented. “Someone sent me what was clearly an AI generated doc. I read it, realized it was all AI, had my AI summarize it and ended up with nothing that brought new thinking to the idea… This is a doom loop.”

As CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management Johnny Taylor Jr told the Guardian, corporate executives are increasingly feeling that, when it comes to AI, “we’re driving the truck and building it at the same time, and that’s a problem.”

“If we could all rewind… we would have introduced [this] in a more thoughtful, slow way,” Taylor continued.

As consumer-grade AI agents make headlines for troubling capers, practical AI at the enterprise level remains stunted. And though low-effort AI slop might be the most prevalent consequence of AI in the workplace, some side effects are much worse.

As a September survey by the firm Ernst and Young found, some 36 percent of senior AI executives at firms with over $1 billion in annual revenue have already experienced a catastrophic “AI incident” which ended up causing financial damage, operational disruptions, data loss, or brand damage.

Put it all together, and it’s not hard to see why corporations are starting to balk at the AI revolution — even those, like Microsoft, whose own success depends on selling the promise of AI to everybody else.

More on AI: Other AI Companies Should Be Very Afraid of What Just Happened to Character.AI, According to Its Own Bankruptcy Documents

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Nearly a year ago, news began to spread of an experimental weight loss drug called retatrutide, under development by Eli Lilly. Though the drug hadn’t made it through clinical trials, nevermind been released by a federally licensed manufacturer, a rapidly-growing black market ensured interested customers didn’t have to wait for the real deal.

Now, the bill on those black market knockoffs seems to be coming due. As CBS reports, the consequences of the unapproved retatrutide trade have now become deadly.

According to the broadcaster, the Food and Drug Administration has received at least two reports of deaths related to the use of bootleg retatrutide in recent months — the first public accounts from health officials acknowledging that the knockoffs contributed to users’ deaths.

Though CBS viewed documents related to the two deaths, it noted that the details haven’t been independently verified, and it remains to be seen whether the black market retatrutide was the principle cause of death in either case, or merely a complicating factor.

Documents related to the death of a 41-year-old woman in July, for example, names retatrutide as a “suspect product” which the deceased obtained “from an unreliable source.” The woman in question was labeled obese, and died after going into cardiac arrest.

Though more information is needed to determine whether the knockoffs were truly responsible for the deaths, the FDA’s interest is telling. In April, Medpage Today reported a case of retatrutide overdose which led to extreme side effects for the user which included kidney injury, extreme dehydration, and diarrhea lasting at least a week.

And though the FDA is at least aware of the dubious retatrutide trade, the federal government’s lax attitude toward bootleg peptides throughout the second Trump administration is arguably a principle factor contributing to the rise of sketchy knockoffs.

“It is concerning because of the breakdown of our drug-approval process in the United States of America,” associate professor at Harvard Medical School Pieter Cohen told CBS.

More on peptides: Pete Davidson Has Been Crushing Black Market Peptides to Get Disgustingly Swole

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Amazon has officially surpassed a fleet of 1 million robots, an arsenal of mechanical arms, Roomba-like floor loaders, and hulking pallet sorting machines.

Each robot is a node in an intricate web allowing the corporation to speed up delivery times and lower overhead. But for the over 1.5 million full- and part-time workers relying on Amazon wages to pay their bills, the company’s bot army represents rising competition — not just metaphorically, but physically.

As George Mason University professor of business Brad Greenwood told Ars Technica in a recent interview, Amazon’s warehouse robots aren’t just helping Amazon cut costs on labor, but are literally boxing humans out of workspaces in the company’s facilities.

“For the last 100 years, most of the automation that we’ve seen usually happens away from workers,” Greenwood explained. “You’re taking that high-risk task away from the worker, and you’re doing so in a way that is not physically proximate.”

Yet the growth of Amazon’s robot fleet “really changes that dynamic for two reasons: one is that it is physically proximate, and two, the robot has the ability to dictate the pace of work,” Greenwood continued.

That shifting terrain is great for Amazon’s bottom line. The robots help decrease friction across the company’s vast logistics empire, increasing speed and strengthening the company’s bottom line. And by allowing robots to “dictate the pace” of work, as Greenwood put it, Amazon is also loosening its need for human labor, disempowering workers both on an individual basis and in any potential collective bargaining arrangements.

Beyond the shop floor, Amazon’s robots also serve as a near-constant source of buzzy PR, as exciting achievements in automation overshadow the more mundane but widespread reality of workplace injuries. It’s especially convenient for Amazon, as conditions in the company’s facilities appear to become more dangerous as more robots roll out to the floor (and that’s to say nothing of the impact of AI-mediated human resources).

As director of strategic research at the trade union coalition Strategic Organizing Center, Joan Moriarty, told Ars: “Amazon likes to talk about its latest robots because it doesn’t want to talk about the tens of thousands of Amazon workers who are injured every year due to Amazon’s obsession with maximizing speed and minimizing costs.”

More on Amazon: Amazon Warns Local Communities to Stop Defying Its Massive AI Data Centers

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When your company is gearing up for one of the hottest IPOs in stock market history, you’d better believe investors and outside experts alike will be poring over your finances with a fine-toothed comb.

This is the situation AI lab Anthropic finds itself in during the run-up to its widely anticipated public offering. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic had told private investors its revenue had grown 45 percent to nearly $17 billion. That news came nearly a month after news broke that the AI company was bragging to investors that it was profitable — although only if you used a special accounting method that stripped out most of its expenses.

Yet as investors immediately noticed, that $17 billion revenue figure is a drop in the bucket compared to the kind of growth needed to sustain the firm’s anticipated $2 trillion valuation. As Business Insider notes, Anthropic’s third quarter income might look incredible on paper, but it falls far short of the growth needed to justify its 13-figure target.

“Not good enough,” a social media account belonging to market research blog Geiger Capital commented in a post. “It’s over.”

“Anyone remember this?” posted AI researcher and critic Gary Marcus, alongside a screenshot of a headline stating that Anthropic would need revenue of about $190-200 billion by 2028 to justify its valuation. “They ain’t gonna come close.”

Anyone remember this?

They ain’t gonna come close. pic.twitter.com/qkPTJmmwJi

— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) October 15, 2026

After the revenue announcement, Reuters reported that some investors immediately began weighing a lower valuation of about $1.5 trillion, representing a $500 billion gap in Anthropic’s narrative.

Their concerns are understandable at this stage in the game, as the extremely high cost of the AI buildout is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. Whether Anthropic’s revenue growth trends upward — and steeply enough — is a crucial issue for the broader tech sector: in late September, a leaked IPO filing revealed that the company brought in $4.6 billion in revenue across 2025, but lost $42 billion.

Given that the AI lab has committed to spending some $518 billion on AI infrastructure over the next decade, though, the time for Anthropic to tap into explosive revenue growth was clearly yesterday.

More on Anthropic: Eggheads at Anthropic Said They Used Claude to “Solve” Humor

The post Investors Disturbed by Anthropic’s Financial Data appeared first on Futurism.

When it comes to hardware, Amazon’s strategy has historically been to throw spaghetti at the wall and pray it sticks.

There was the Amazon Fire Phone in 2014, a $170 million flop with a gimmicky 3D camera system. Then came the Amazon Tap, a clunky, Echo-style home assistant device that did away with voice-activation, instead requiring users to press a physical button. And of course, who could forget those silly Amazon Dash Buttons?

They all build context for Amazon’s latest gadget: an always-on wearable microphone that constantly listens in to your conservations.

Called the “Bee,” Amazon’s new hardware platform spans two devices, which are basically just a large language model (LLM) packed onto a watch-sized microphone, as Gizmodo reported. Customers can currently buy the “Bee Frontier” wearable version, which comes with a watch strap, for $75. Or Amazon aficionados can hold out for the “Bee Eclipse,” a $100 plastic puck that fits onto the back of your phone.

And when we say these gadgets are always listening, we mean it. Don’t take our word for it — in its press release announcing the new devices, Amazon explained that the Bee Frontier has a seven-day battery life, allowing it to “stay with you through a full week without interruption.”

This being an Amazon device, e-commerce is an essential selling point: “whether it’s remembering the details of important meetings, taking note of the coffee plans you made in passing, or simply ensuring you purchase the dish soap you said you’d buy, Bee Frontier will remember the details for you,” the release enthused.

As you might expect by this point in 2026, you’re not getting away with a one-time purchase. In order to use some core features like “unlimited recent conversation summaries” and access to an Alexa-style “personal chat assistant,” Bee owners will need to subscribe to Bee Pro, which costs $12 a month. (New customers get a month of Bee Pro on the house.)

The device follows a growing trend among hardware brands to eschew physical interactivity in favor of AI-integrated monitoring devices. Meta has its AI Glasses, which have been found recording users even when they’re in sleep mode, while OpenAI is developing a screen-less smart speaker engineered by famed Apple designer Jony Ive.

Whether any of these devices catch on with consumers remains to be seen, but it seems unlikely. A YouGov poll from earlier this year found that some 61 percent of Americans feel it’s very important to limit who has access to their data — which isn’t a great sign for anybody selling what amounts to an AI-powered ankle monitor.

More on hardware: Anthropic Warns “AI Worms” Will Infect Your Smart Home Devices and Use Them to Self-Replicate Beyond Control

The post Amazon Launches Ominous Wearable Ankle Monitor-Style Gadget That Records You Constantly appeared first on Futurism.

If you’re one of the over 100 million people around the world who regularly hits the vape, you might want to think about ways to start cutting back.

According to some recent research by scientists from Seoul National University and published in Nature Medicine, the use of non-tobacco devices like vapes and e-cigarettes to help quit smoking carries a strong link with the development of lung cancer.

The researchers analyzed anonymous health data from over 4.5 million Korean adults. They were split into three main groups: current smokers, short-term quitters, and long-term quitters. They were then categorized by whether they vaped daily during a 2018 screening in the Korean National Health survey, with adjustments to control for factors like age, sex, and prior health conditions.

In all, scientists found that those who had turned to vaping after quitting traditional cigarettes developed lung cancer at a rate about 56 percent higher than those who quit entirely. Alarmingly, incidents of lung cancer death among vape users nearly doubled, with a lung cancer-specific death rate 91 percent higher than non-vape users.

Of course, there’s an important group that falls outside the bounds of the study: anyone who got hooked on vaping without trying cigarettes first. It’d be fascinating to learn more about their fates, but the implication of the study — that vaping is turbocharging the chances of cancer among former smokers — is almost certainly cause for alarm.

While it may be easy for non-smokers to roll their eyes at the findings, it’s important to note that empirical data on the relationship between vaping and lung cancer remains relatively scarce.

“Although epidemiological and biological studies support the association between e-cigarettes and various respiratory disorders, evidence regarding the relationship between e-cigarettes and lung cancer risk remains limited,” the researchers wrote.

It’s an observational study, meaning that it can’t establish true causality. Going forward, more research is needed to say for sure whether there’s a causal association between vaping and cancer — but the early data doesn’t look pretty.

More on smoking: Scientists Say Test Subjects Were Able to Quit Smoking After They Blasted Their Brains With a Huge Magnet

The post Vaping Strongly Linked to Lung Cancer appeared first on Futurism.

A 94-year-old electronics mogul is in hot water with Chicago authorities, who claim that his hare-brained plan to feed hungry squirrels is instead sustaining a massive plague of rats.

As previous owner of the billion-dollar electrical manufacturing company Tripp Lite, businessman Barre Seid has been putting his largess to use by paying a small army of workers to sprinkle an assortment of tree nuts across Chicago-area parks, Fortune reports.

As local resident Caroline Novak told Chicago WGN, it’s “like a luxury mélange of really nice nuts: I’m talking Brazil nuts and walnuts… these are not acorns.”

Though Seid’s target audience seems to be local squirrels, residents and city officials note that rats have quickly grown to depend on the regular feedings. As Novak’s husband told WGN, he counted over 40 rats digging holes near nut piles during a recent walk through Lincoln Park.

The bizarre operation has evidently been underway for years at this point, earning the billionaire heaps of civil violations carrying relatively small fines. Wealthy as he is, Seid has reportedly had no problem paying those fees and carrying on — the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, as the old saying goes.

“When you’re a billionaire and you have a weird hobby and someone tries to stop you, you have complete impunity,” Novak told Block Club Chicago in a separate interview. “You just triple down because why not? You’ll pay $40,000 in fines. You don’t care.”

Now in 2026, authorities in Chicago are reaching their breaking point. Alderman Timmy Knudsen — whose jurisdiction covers the area of Lincoln Park Seid’s workers are active in — is now pushing the Chicago Park District to sue Seid in order to stop the nuttiness once and for all.

“For years, a billionaire family has carried out a paid operation to feed local wildlife, disrupting our rat abatement efforts and causing an infestation that has made parts of the park unusable for other residents,” Knudsen’s office told Fortune in a statement. “We’re hopeful that raising awareness and drawing attention to the issue will ultimately lead to better behavior and a safer park for our community.”

More on tech billionaires: Billionaires Pouring Money Into Ads About How AI Data Centers Are Actually Good

The post 94 Year-Old Electronics Billionaire Accused of Hiring Goons to Infest Chicago With Huge Rat Swarm appeared first on Futurism.

When your company’s bread-and-butter is selling crypto devices advertised as having “industry leading” security, you better keep a close eye on your supply chain.

That’s a hard lesson learned by Ledger, a company specializing in secure blockchain wallets, after news broke that some of its devices had been infiltrated by a mysterious “hardware implant.” According to Bleeping Computer, the malicious implant was designed to monitor inputs made onto each wallet via on-board buttons, along with changes in output on the devices’ e-ink screens.

By monitoring this data, the hardware implant could reportedly identify the use of a seed phrase — a sequence of words used to generate static wallet addresses on the blockchain — which it would then transmit to hackers using an eSIM.

As a result of the implants, a number of Ledger users had their crypto wallets drained, prompting an investigation by the company. After probing a number of devices, Ledger concluded that the compromised wallets originated from an electronics reseller out of Malaysia named CryptoBilis.

Though it remains to be seen where CryptoBilis obtained the hacked devices, Ledger put out a statement recommending customers avoid purchasing and activating any of its hardware purchased from the reseller.

“As a precaution, and pending the results of our investigation, we have asked CryptoBilis to pause all sales and shipments of Ledger devices,” the company warned in a statement on X-formerly-Twitter.

Though Ledger stated that they “have no indication that Ledger’s security infrastructure, systems or services have been compromised,” the interception does raise some crucial questions around the security of the devices and Ledger’s oversight of its hardware supply chain.

If a supposedly world-beating crypto wallet can be easily cracked to drain users’ wallets, how can customers trust any supplier — CryptoBilis or otherwise — to sell secure devices?

More on data privacy: Meta’s Muse Is Spying on All Your Friends and Family

The post These Supposedly Super Secure Ledger Blockchain Wallets Are Secretly Draining User’s Crypto Holdings appeared first on Futurism.

In the American psyche, data centers have become so reviled that big tech can’t even pay residents life changing money to welcome the facilities into their backyards.

That’s not an exaggeration: voters in the former coal-mining community of Hazle Township, Pennsylvania are mobilizing en masse against a massive Amazon Web Services facility that would come along with a $10,000 direct cash dividend to every resident.

That’s according to reporting by PennLive, which notes that nearly 17 percent of the township’s residents live below the federal poverty line. Despite the possibility of a $10,000 payout, residents are organizing to reject both the data center campus itself — named “Project Hazelnut” by the developer NorthPoint Development — and a lengthy stretch of power lines meant to supply power to the facility.

As PennLive observes, the $10,000 scheme is an unusual attempt by a data center developer to smooth over opposition in a section of the country which is overwhelmingly opposed to the facilities.

“We think it’s creative. We’ve not seen (anything like) this,” executive director of the Pennsylvania Ethics Commission Mary Fox told PennLive of the strategy.

Yet residents of Hazle Township aren’t swayed by the prospect of fast cash, viewing it as a payoff, and a weak one at that.

“It’s like bribery,” as local resident Brian Malloy told PennLive.

“Our property values are going to drop. Dramatically,” said Ed Negra, a homeowner and small business owner who characterized the $10,000 as a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of allowing Project Hazelnut to go forward. “If that’s not a bribe, I don’t know what is.”

The matter is far from settled, though it doesn’t help that both state and local officials are acting shifty. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, for example, has previously characterized the project as a “technology campus,” using an executive order to fast-track the process by which developers can erect data center facilities across Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, PennLive reports that Hazle Township supervisor Anthony Griguoli has struggled to present a united front with NorthPoint Development, even as his office works to engineer a zoning ordinance which would allow Project Hazelnut to plow forward.

When residents cornered Griguoli at a town meeting in August about the $10,000 bribes, he shrugged that “that’s what they’re saying they want to do,” adding that “I don’t even know if that’s legit, that it’s going to happen.”

More on data centers: This Graph of Data Center Spending Compared to All Other Construction Will Give You Chills

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